


Sea of Moving Emotion

by saltslimes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, endgame spoilers via far from home spoilers, mentions of like a bunch of other characters but it seemed pointless to tag them, spoilers for everything essentially, tony but like hes REDACTED
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-09 15:51:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19479115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltslimes/pseuds/saltslimes
Summary: Even though it hurts, he lies down on his side, and the room is a little hazy, and his thoughts hit each other like objects suspended in a gel. Foreign bodies in the web fluid, ruining the batch.---Directly after the REDACTED fight in FFH, Happy has to switch out of superhero backup mode and into babysitting mode.





	Sea of Moving Emotion

**Author's Note:**

> You are here because you saw the movie already, okay, great, let's go.
> 
> When Peter is on the plane with Happy (and I saw the movie twice to confirm this) he's like, getting stitches, and then he stands up because he's upset and Happy like, I guess leaves the needle in his back? Peter goes over to the 3d suit printer and messes around so I have this theory that at some point while they were actually flying, Happy came over and was like hey, just gonna cut this, okay.  
> But I didn't feel like writing that whole scene. Quentin Beck truly had it out for Peter's ribs. I mean, he wanted to kill him, but regardless.

It was several more steps before he stopped feeling like the ground was moving under him. And then into the car. Happy always gets a car. He like, summons one. It’s what he does. Peter sinks in his seat until his eyes are level with the dash and Happy frowns at him.

“You hang in there, okay?” He reaches out like he’s gonna squeeze Peter’s shoulder or something and then pulls it back like he thinks better of it.

They’ve been driving for a few minutes before Peter can find the energy to peel his eyes open, and then he wonders aloud where they’re going.

“Tony had a place around here.” He taps his fingers on the wheel and signals a lane change, and then huffs a sigh. “You know they blew up the plane? What is it with you and planes?”

“I dunno, it’s terrible,” Peter says. He starts to laugh, but that pulls at something broken. A lot of stuff is broken, actually. Usually after a fight he feels pretty bruised. But this is worse. This feels like… he laughs, for real this time, although it seriously hurts.

“Ow, ow.”

“What’s so funny?”

“I got hit by a train.”

“I—okay. Did you hit your head in this fight?”

“I hit everything.” Peter runs a hand through his hair. He’s like, severely greasy. MJ kissed him. She kissed him… greasy. It hurts to breathe, and his leg is feeling like it would be better off not attached to his body but… yeah. She kissed him. Also, it doesn’t feel all that much worse than getting hit by the train did. Less worse, actually, because right now he doesn’t have anything he’s supposed to be dealing with.

He wants to fall asleep so so badly and the drive is slow and relaxing-ish although there’s a lot of yelling and stuff going on outside. His spider-sense has gone kinda quiet. But it hurts too much to sleep, and there’s blood drying on his face and in his suit, all itchy and a little sore. The broken bones aren’t un-breaking themselves very fast. He probably shouldn’t have fought after the train. He had to, but, still.

Tony’s old place has an elevator. That’s the only thing Peter can think about, it’s what keeps him standing, although he rests his head on the wall. It’s a penthouse, and the elevator opens up into it. But the apartment itself isn’t all that overwhelming, it’s more liveable than the kinds of spaces Tony usually constructs. Constructed.

It all gets thick and heavy for a moment, he can feel himself tearing up and he can still hear the gunshot, feels Beck’s wrist in his hand, oh god, and he’s dead, he’s actually dead.

In a place like this it’s impossible to easily spot a garbage can, and he doesn’t have time to find the bathroom so he limps to the sink to throw up.

“Whoa, wrong way you need—oh.” Happy cuts himself off when Peter retches, and for a minute his ears are ringing and he misses whatever gets said next. His puke is off-blue (the Gatorade he chugged on the plane feels about a million years ago). He grips the sink to maintain his ability to stay standing, and the metal groans under his fingers.

Happy does touch him, eventually. Just a hand between his shoulder blades, tentative.

“Hey kid. Let’s get you… come on.” Happy taps him lightly. Peter covers his face with his hand and allows himself to be led away, until he’s sitting on a couch—one of those rich-people couches that’s not that comfortable, and is deeper and flatter than a couch should be. And now his hands are shaking.

Happy bustles around the apartment grabbing stuff, kind of like he did on the plane. The suit is cut up, and it stinks like smoke.

“I’ll grab you some clothes,” Happy says, and vanishes into another room. Peter thinks about Quentin Beck’s dead body. He thinks about some kind of contaminant that’s stinging in a cut right now. He tries not to think about how fucked up his leg is. He tries not to notice that he can feel his ribs grating against each other.

Even though it hurts, he lies down on his side, and the room is a little hazy, and his thoughts hit each other like objects suspended in a gel. Foreign bodies in the web fluid, ruining the batch.

{H}

Happy gets stuck, just for a moment, seriously just a moment when he’s looking through the drawer for a clean shirt. Which there are plenty of, and they’re Tony’s shirts, which he would give to the kid without blinking. But they represent, suddenly, a finite resource. There will never be any more Tony’s shirts. They will be used up or given away or thrown out.

He stuffs those thoughts in the same place he’s stuffing the leftover terror from almost dying and trying to protect a bunch of teenagers from high powered drones, right after which one of them literally  _ ran away _ , sure so she could go talk to the kid but that didn’t mean it gave him less of a heart attack.

When he comes back in the kid is slumped over on his side, unmoving, so he gets to revisit the heart attack zone.

“Peter?  _ Peter _ !” He doesn’t mean to be so loud, it just happens that way.

“Huh?” Peter mumbles. So he’s not out, he’s just, not all there either.

Taking the suit off sucks. For a lot of reasons. It’s awkward for both of them, it obviously hurts Peter, and it keeps revealing nastier and nastier injuries. He looked bad with it on, but shirtless and inexplicably shivering he looks fucking terrible. The whole right side of his chest is blooming pink and where it’s not pink it’s because it’s already purple going-on-black. Happy checks the stitches he never got to finish. The cut is healed in a sloppy, scabby way. The stitches tore out at some point but that might be for the best.

“You’re a mess, huh,” Happy says softly. Peter makes a sound that might be a laugh or a sob but it’s genuinely impossible to tell.  _ Aw shit _ . It was like this with Tony but it was… Tony wasn’t a kid. He wasn’t sixteen.

“I’m getting some stuff delivered, a splint for your leg and some other things. You want some painkillers?”

“They don’t work on me.” Peter says it too easily, and Happy halts himself before he can do any mental math about how many scrapes this kid’s gotten in since he was spider-ized. And he’s never been able to take an Advil for it.

“Maybe some that would kill a 300-pound man?” he suggests. There was a conversation at some point about painkillers for Cap, and there’s probably… maybe someone he could call. He wants to call May back, tell her he’s actually in over his head and wants to fly her to London, but he did literally just reassure her Peter was okay.

“I ate a half a bottle of Tylenol once but it just made me puke.”

“I’d like you to stop sharing things that make me sad.” Happy decides that the best method is just going to be to tape the kid together and hopefully get him to rest. He heals fast, the thing he probably needs the most is sleep and electrolytes.

“Sorry,” Peter says. He’s looking off at a blank space of wall, and Happy doesn’t know if he’s dazed from exhaustion or blood loss or both. Happy pats his shoulder lightly, and that’s the last straw apparently, because Peter slumps onto him, presses his face into Happy’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s… you’re okay kid.” He pats his back awkwardly. 

“I’m getting blood on you.”

“Tony’s gotten a lot worse on me.” This is true, unimpeachably so. Peter’s clinging to Happy’s jacket like it’s his only lifeline.  _ Call May, call May _ , his brain is screaming. Peter makes another indistinguishable sound.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing.” Apparently apologies are all Peter has to say because he’s silent for the next few moments.

“Are you hooking up with my aunt?” Peter asks. He doesn’t pull away to ask this, in fact, he’s gone kind of boneless. This is why Tony was always making heart-attack jokes. This kid is a genuine menace to any given adult’s health. 

“Uh. Do I have to answer that right now? I don’t want to.”

“It’s fine,” Peter says. He laughs, and then groans. “It hurts so bad to laugh.”

“Your ribs are fucked up.” Happy waits a moment, still holding Peter up, feeling awkward as shit but at the same time kind of… right, or like he’s doing the least he can. He finishes taping him up, puts a shirt on the kid like he’s a baby. Not that Happy has experience with that. He babysat Morgan pretty sparingly. 

“You stay here, I’m gonna grab the stuff from the delivery guy, okay?” He presses Peter back into the couch, where he just slumps and gives a non-committal nod.

Pepper video calls while he’s in the elevator. And she forces the call through without hesitation.

“Spider-man in London?’

“He’s fine, everything’s fine, I’ll explain in a bit.”

“Happy, what—”

“Hi Happy! You’re all shiny.” Morgan forces her little face into frame. Happy feels like the Grinch at the end of the movie, which is an effect Morgan has on everybody.

“Yeah, hi there! Your mommy called while I’m kinda busy.”

“You are really sweaty,” Pepper says. “Like really.”

“I know, okay, I was running all over London. I have to go. Bottom line: everything’s fine, basically. The kid is beat to hell but he heals fast.”

“Okay. You need anything?”

“To get off this phone call? Sorry.”

“Go figure it out, Happy,” Pepper says, which in their fucked up semblance of a friendship or a family or whatever probably means take care, love you. He hangs up on her.

When he gets back upstairs he half expects to find Peter passed out, and a tiny dreading part of him is worried the kid will just have died or something from sheer amount of stuff he’s been thrown into in the last 48 hours. But Peter is sitting on the couch with a hand over his broken ribs looking miserable.

“You know you did good, right?” Happy says, dropping the bags. Peter says nothing. He even inherited Tony’s brooding, which is fucking fantastic. “Okay. Well I got you some electrolytes, and that splint.”

“What am I gonna do?”

“Rest. Heal. Definitely don’t jump off anything for the next twelve or so hours.”

“No, I mean like, about the trip? Are they still going home without me or…?” Right then, on the couch, in Tony’s slightly-too-large shirt and loose sweats, and with his hair disgusting with sweat, he looks really small. Really young. There’s a big bruise starting to bloom on the side of his face. He’s looking at Happy like he did on the plane, eyes watery and red and like it hurts to breathe, which is probably does, to be honest. Happy’s never been hit by a train but he’s been knocked down by Black Widow and he feels like he has a frame of reference.

“All the flights will be grounded for a while. If you heal up in time, we’ll get you on a flight home with your friends. Otherwise we can coordinate your return from Berlin—Look, we’ll figure it out. I’ll handle it.”

“Okay.” Peter seems like he’s giving in finally, his shoulders slump and the tension seems to drain out of him. Happy presses a Gatorade into his hands and moves to go put the rest away.

“Happy, wait,” Peter says hoarsely. Happy wants to grab him by the shoulders and tell him to rest already, but he doesn’t. “Can you—something that only you would know. Please.”

“Only I would know,” Happy says, to give himself a second to think. “That night you took down Toomes, and the plane crashed, moving day. You webbed him up for us, and then you were waiting on top of the Cyclone. Without your mask even on, like a dumbass.”

“Yeah,” Peter says. He sounds hurt and touched and amused all at once. Happy puts the drinks in the fridge. He orders takeout. He sends a text to Rhodey with vague details. When he comes back to the couch the kid is passed out, finally. He puts a blanket over him, and then he just sits down beside him. It’s a huge sectional. Tony was addicted to huge sectionals, for some reason. He never bought at couch that Happy liked. He rests a hand on Peter’s shoulder, leaves it there for both of them. So they each know someone is there.

**Author's Note:**

> me at me: move over Tony there's a new dynamic in town and it's called Step-Uncle
> 
> i wrote a lot of this in bed on my phone and its not betaed so like, sorry
> 
> [tumblr if ya like](https://saltslimes.tumblr.com/)


End file.
